Now we know. You can’t replace vinyl with cd. Cd doesn’t have enough thingness to it. You can however replace cd with download. Download is virtual in its pure state, cd is half thing, half virtual. A hybrid. Nature abhors the hybrid. Except for the legendary Swiss Army Knife, most other hybrids come and go, like the car-boat and the set-top box.

What you never got with the cd that you have with vinyl is the requirement to handle with care. CDs are diss’d because they can be tossed about, left on the car floor, and still play (usually). No self-respecting music fan would treat her records that way. And you can’t watch those shiny cds play. You slip them into a drawer, and music comes out. You are disconnected, you don’t lift the needle to move to a new track. Now we know that this is not an improvement, this is deprivation. We need to interact with things. It’s wonderful, a rite of modern living, to put a record on and hear the music. It takes deliberate action, focus, and then the reward.

Now we know. Vinyl records are coming back, to a certain level, not because they offer superior sound (they do), but because they are objects with a purpose. The thingness of an LP is strong. Very strong. We humans need that.

Last Sunday the New York Times ran an article about GE’s worries over flagship broadcast asset NBC. No surprise, NBC is in trouble.  So much trouble that GE is about to dump it. Think about that.  GE leaving broadcast television, and NBC on its way to minor league status.

Four years ago Time Warner sold Warner Bros Records and all of its cousins, packaged as the Warner Music Group. It was bought, and subsequently taken public by, Edgar Bronfman, Jr., scion of Montreal’s Seagram’s dynasty. He had already tried, unsuccessfully, to run Universal Pictures and Records after using his Seagram assets to buy controlling interest in Vivendi Universal, but was forced out. Bronfman, as the saying goes, has more dollars than sense.

MGM studios is $23 billion in debt and about to be auctioned off. The lead bidder? Indie movie house Lion’s Gate. MGM- the lion- passing through Lion’s Gate.

What does it tell us, at large, when big corporations leave the entertainment business? You could say, cynically, they are rats jumping from a sinking ship. That would be a truth, but a limited view of the truth. Corporations tend to be profitable when then can regularize production and monopolize, or least funnel access to a desired product through their proprietary channels.  Both of those things have fallen apart for corporations in entertainment.

Production. The cost of producing a record or film used to be a barrier to entry. It took cash, and it was the big companies that could supply it. With the cash came strings. Artists of all types: musicians, filmmakers, producers, actors, signed with a corporation for exclusive rights to their work, for (typically) a long time. They got paid (usually), but they did not control their own work, and they did not have the wherewithal to produce and market it on their own.

That has changed.  A movie or record or tv show can be produced for a fraction of what it cost ten years ago. Digital technology has reduced cost and increased quality by orders of magnitude. Marketing is still expensive and complex, but distribution is not. The Internet solved that.

Monopoly. Corporations love monopolies. That is the ideal. Seldom is there a pure monopoly, unless you count your local power and light company, but corporations thrive on controlling as much access to a desired thing as they possibly can. Now, in entertainment and many other fields, everyone knows there are multitude options, legal and not, for obtaining anything digital. In other words everything the entertainment industry puts out. Two critical pillars of corporate advantage, limited access to production and monopoly status, are gone. Which is why the corporations are leaving.

Is this a good or bad thing, this leaving? It depends on where you sit, and how old you are. If you are a band like Fleetwood Mac, and you are used to the infrastructure of corporate backing, you are unsettled in the newly atomized world. If you are a young act with a great business team and Internet savvy, you might like it fine. Those that can tap the Internet to build their own base will have an advantage very few of their predecessors ever had– an unmediated relationship with the audience. When Elton had a hit in 1974, he had to sell two million copies to make a million bucks for himself.   An artist with ownership of his own product AND ownership of the audience channel, needs to sell only 100,000 units to make a million bucks.  I expect that soon we will see some rich musicians and management, doing it on numbers drastically smaller than the Old Days.  Where does the corporation fit in?

Good question.

The great Cream drummer Ginger Baker rarely played the standard rock’n'roll backbeat. Backbeat puts the crack of the snare on beats 2 and 4 of a 4/4 measure, the bass on 1 and 3. A million and one rock songs live on the backbeat, but not if Ginger was the stickman. The complex Baker style typically puts the snare on 1 and 3, or more likely, substitutions of hi-hat, tom-tom and cymbals to go along with the propulsive snare. There is a feeling of upness, of the song airborne, in Ginger’s playing. Not to mention ferocious drive. I like a good backbeat, love a good backbeat, but if Ginger’s in charge, I’ll take his brew, strange or otherwise, anytime.

Cosmic troubadour David Gans opens for hot jam wizards Boris Garcia on four California dates this week.
Thursday, November 5, 9:45pm: Connecticut Yankee, 100 Connecticut Street, San Francisco
Friday, November 6: Harvest Hoedown – Willits Center for the Arts, 71 E Commercial Street, Willits CA
Saturday, November 7, 9:30pm: Starry Plough, 3101 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley CA
Sunday, November 8: Humboldt Brews, 856 10th Street, Arcata CA. 707-826-2739

Boris Garcia and David Gans Northern California Tour

Hi Greg,
Broke down and bought Revolver at Borders the other night.  Listened down three times, and here is my report:
1. It’s clean and clear, but no improvement whatsoever over my 1982 British-press vinyl release on Parlophone.  That’s not to say it isn’t great, but that pressing from ‘82 was always the one to beat, to my ears.
2a. The big advantage of digital technology is not clarity, but dynamic range.  Analog can be (and typically is) perfectly clear and defined, but has limits, especially in the case of vinyl as compared to tape, with big shifts from soft to loud.  The CD, when it came out, was touted as being able to accurately reproduce the dynamic flow that is present in all great music.  Instead, it quickly became a “convenient” and “portable” medium.  The compression that had to be used on records to make them fit (on vinyl) was transferred, intact, to CDs.  Occasionally you will find artists and producers, like Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, who understand and exploit this aspect of digital, but generally it has become the norm to use a lot of compression– because it has a certain sound, the sound of pop music on the radio.
2b. Revolver, and I’ll wager, all the rest of the Beatles remasters, is highly compressed.  Bummer.  Tomorrow Never Knows, Good Day Sunshine, And Your Bird Can Sing, Eleanor Rigby– should breathe with the dynamics of live performance.  Instead, they are crystal-clear but canned.  This a too bad.  The same team that did a great job on Let It Be…naked, which is a step in the right direction dynamically, did these remasters, but all they’ve achieved is to make them sound like first-press vinyl.  Again, there is nothing “wrong” with that, but it is so much less than it could be. They could have put us in the room with the Beatles.  Instead, here we are in 2009, listening the Beatles on the radio, the DJ spinning a very good pressing.  Just like old times.

by Gregory M. Kerwin

Mourning Lux Interior, lead weirdo of the Cramps, who died Wednesday at 60. The Cramps were a mainstay on the turntable at the Valencia Street Home for Wayward Boys. I saw them once, quite enough, at the On Broadway in 1980, a nice place in SF with a real stage. I saw them with Kid Congo Powers on lead guitar, one of the founders of Gun Club, who joined them on the Psychedelic Jungle album, their greatest. Powers was invited in after a show in New York where the Cramps had turned off the lights and lined the front of the stage with lit candles. Kid got too close and ignited his hairspray. The band pulled him up on the stage to pat his hair out and discovered he wasn’t just an ardent fan – he was Kid Congo Powers. After that the Cramps had to get him into the band. They never played with a bass. Lux, well over six feet tall, skinny, paper white, had on tight black leather pants and no shirt. He had a huge coal-black pompadour sprayed high over his head. He sweated throughout the show and the hairspray wilted until the hair was hanging down in his face. His dance and performance look borrowed a lot from Iggy Pop, writhing and snaky, but Lux had a great rock n roll voice that could do anything he wanted. His wife Poison Ivy played rhythm guitar. She had on a mini-skirt and a push-up bodice, ripped fishnet hose, needle-pointed boots and a permanent sneer, chewing gum with a smirk through the entire show, kicking adoring punk Johnnies in the head if they got too close to where she was standing at the edge of the stage. The drummer was Knick Knox, whose kit was one snare, one cymbal, and the kickdrum. The laziest drummer ever, he spent the entire show eyeballing everybody in the audience, smoking incessantly, keeping time with one hand and the kickdrum. He kept his other hand busy with the cigarette, spare foot propped up on the cymbal stand. Knox had a toy bat suspended on a rubber band from the front of the kickdrum that would bounce in rhythm whenever he’d hit the drum. Lux did his famous one-man vocal car crash – he deep-throated the mic, and while the rest of the band took a break Lux created an entire tableau of screeching tires, shredding sheet metal and crunching windshields with mouth and throat noises, the mic wire snaking out of his mouth while he swam around stage, flapping and waving his long arms like a huge cadaverous pterodactyl. One of a kind, excellent singer actually, a completely committed entertainer, funny all the time, funny as hell, spooky and just the coolest. Always.

January 22, 2009 – Berkeley, California: Rubber Souldiers live at Ashkenaz.  Three guys in front, Lorin Rowan, David Gans and Chris Rowan,  singing their hearts out and throwing down the jam.  It’s the Beatles catalog, songs everybody knows, but this is different.  This is deconstruction– shifting time signatures, riffs morphing into improvised rivers of tone, a hail of electric guitars join mandolins where pianos once played, but always that great singing.  This is the Rowan Brothers folks, with their new brother David, and those boys got the pipes.  The audience is up and dancing four bars into the first song, the driving Dr. Robert.  Rubber Souldiers they are, and plenty of 1965 is here: Girl, The Word, Norwegian Wood.  N-Wood shows what this band can do, departing from the original but always finding the handle again and giving us our Beatle kicks.  Zac Matthews, late of Hot Buttered Rum, joined in here, in fact wrote the arrangement, and lays in some ripping mando leads along with brother Lorin.  As the night grew deeper, darker, we felt the mood expand, and by the time they came through with the cosmic Day Tripper to close out the evening, we knew we had seen the beginning of something big.

Souldiers captured at Ashkenaz 1/22/09

IMG_4208 steve goodman jim and david

Originally uploaded by Look.

David Gans and Jim Rothermel rock the house on Steve Goodman’s “Elvis Imitator,” part of a touching and informative reading/rocking/remembrance of the late great Goodman. Spur of the event was Clay Eals, whose new book, “Facing the Music,” gives the garrulous Goodman his due—  four pounds worth. The whole affair was in the house at Moe’s Books, Telegraph Ave Berkeley, Monday July 28, 2008.